The Organizational
Coercion Index

The Organizational Coercion Index is an independent educational research project. Its purpose is straightforward: to apply the framework developed by Daniella Mestyanek Young and Amy Reed in The Culting of America systematically and evenhandedly across a broad range of American organizations — and to make those assessments publicly available as a documented, auditable research resource.

The value of this project is intrinsic. Understanding which institutional architectures produce high-control group dynamics — and which do not — is analytically and educationally important regardless of any particular argument or application. The dataset stands on its own. It will continue to grow, be revised as methodology improves, and remain publicly accessible.

Young and Reed identify ten criteria that characterize cult-adjacent organizations — from charismatic leadership and sacred assumptions through to high exit costs and ends-justify-the-means institutional behavior. The framework was designed as a diagnostic tool: applied to a single organization, it helps members understand whether the group they belong to has the architecture of a high-control system.

This project extends that diagnostic capacity to comparative, dataset-scale analysis. A three-axis scoring system was developed specifically for this purpose: Young's original binary instrument (Cultiness Score, 0–10) runs fully independently alongside a composite score (0–100%) that captures both the breadth and intensity of cult-adjacent dynamics across all ten criteria. A third axis — Lifton's Totalism Score — operates independently of both. The three instruments are never converted between each other; their divergence is itself analytically meaningful.

The Totalism Score is derived from Robert Jay Lifton's eight criteria of ideological totalism, assessed as a single synthesized criterion (C11). Where the Young-Reed framework measures behavioral patterns in institutional conduct, Lifton's framework measures the psychological architecture of the belief system — how thought, language, confession, and doctrine function to close off independent judgment. A high Totalism Score can appear in organizations with moderate behavioral control scores; a high Composite Score can appear without significant totalistic ideology. The three axes measure distinct dimensions of coercive institutional dynamics, and their relationships across the dataset are as informative as their individual values.

Every score is anchored to publicly documented, verifiable behaviors — court records, regulatory findings, investigative journalism, academic scholarship, institutional self-documentation. Not reputation. Not presumption. Documented behavior.

Organizations assessed span religious denominations, political movements, military formations, federal agencies, corporate cultures, media institutions, educational systems, advocacy organizations, and historical calibration anchors. The dataset is publicly available on GitHub and updated as new assessments are completed and reviewed.

The framework produces credible results only if the same analytical standard applies regardless of political, religious, or cultural valence. This is non-negotiable — not as a disclaimer, but as a methodological requirement. An assessment tool that scores organizations on one side of the political or cultural spectrum differently than the other is not a research tool. It is advocacy.

Some results confirm intuitions. Some challenge them. That is what systematic, evenhanded analysis produces — and it is the only kind worth doing.